JEREMY ALLEN WHITE IN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

SCOTT COOPER: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE (2025)

Car salesman: "I do know who you are." Springsteen: "That makes one of us."

Deliver Me from Nowhere is largely an accurate portrayal of Bruce Springsteen's life during the creation of his 1982 album Nebraska, with the notable, and for some dubious, departure being the inclusion of a fictional love interest. The film, based on Warren Zanes' book and elements of Springsteen's memoir, focuses on a specific, raw period of his life and career, rather than a full cradle-to-grave narrative.

Film opens with the Boss, played with quiet passion by Jeremy Allen White, wrapping up the very successful tour supporting his 1980 album The River. He has his first top-five hit ("Hungry Heart") and he’s on the verge of music superstardom - but wracked with self doubt. A stark contrast to the young Bob Dylan in last year's hit A Complete Unknown (similar title, though), who is likewise depicted at a transitional moment in a burgeoning major pop music career - but completely confident in himself. The Dylan film is about going electric, and the Springsteen one is about his confronting memories of his alcoholic, dominant father and making his very personal - and personal favorite - album Nebraska. For all but the loyal and the introspective, Chalamet's verve as the confident Dylan may have more appeal than the "agonized, internalized" performance of Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen trying to find himself and create an authentic, surprising piece of work.

One may also contrast this new Scott Cooper film with Bradley Cooper's very different 2023 (NYFF) Maestro, about conductor Leonard Bernstein. Critically that one has done the best, A Complete Unknown a bit less well, and the new Springsteen film rather poorly. The range is from Metacritic 77 to 59. But Letterboxd indicates the public liked Maestro the least (3.1), Nowhere better (3.3) and "it" boy Timothée Chalamet as young Dylan best (3.6). No doubt Springsteen has solid appeal, long established, and Jeremy Allen White is a big hit in "The Bear." Leonard Bernstein is an immense figure of classical music of the twentieth century, but he's not known to young pop fans nor is Bradley Cooper, who played him as well as directing that film.

Personally, I loved Maestro, which was a sensitive time capsule about the conductor's "gay problem," his milieu, and a moment, though many vocally condemned the director-lead actor's wearing of a "Jewish" prosthetic nose for the role - which however Bernstein's own children defended. The "anti-Semitic" claim was another example of the rage for political correctness. Do they object that Chalamet, whose mother is Jewish, didn't look Jewish enough as Dylan - who dropped his Jewish last name?

Objections to Nowhere from amateur citizen "critics" (some on Metacritic) have been that it relies on formulaic music biopic tropes or that it's "lackluster" and "tired." They object to the fact that Jeremy Allen White's physical appearance differs from Springsteen's (not enough prosthetics?), or think lyrics chosen to illustrate flashbacks are too literal or that the film - which is about the artist's problem with depression and his composition of the Nebraska album, not his superstardom - has too little "spectacle." People may object that Deliver Me from Nowhere isn't accurate: but they will have to answer to the Boss himself, who collaborated closely with Cooper on the production and saw to its authenticity and specificity at many points.

David Rooney's intelligently enthusiastic Hollywood Reporter review at Telluride takes a more sensible, even conciliatory, approach. He explains that the choice to consider Springsteen "not as a rock God" but as a "fragile human being who’s also an uncompromising artist" gives Deliver Me From Nowhere "a solemn integrity." But it does not sparkle like either Maestro or A Complete Unknown.

Knowing Springsteen saw to the details helps one appreciate the texture of this film, even if it may inform and touch more than it thrills. At the outset after a brief flashback showing little Bruce meekly trying to collect his drunken dad from a bar, we see the now beginning-to-be-famous singer retire to a woodsy retreat bungalow in Colts Neck, New Jersey. The quote at the top of this page with the car salesman shows where Springsteen was: at a crossroads, consciously unsure who he was. (Maybe that exchange is too on-the-nose, telegraphs that idea too clearly.) Springsteen glimpses Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick's Badlands and finds out it relates to the ‘50s spree killer Charles Starkweather and looks up newspaper stories about him in the library. We've already seen him fondling a large volume of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, which have evidently moved him. These are elements that go into the album. With that we've seen the singer songwriter recognized by a taxi driver: he's famous now - we've been shown that Jeremy Strong's manager is behind him, but the studio suits in the big Manhattan building want hit singles and don't perceive the centrality for the artist of an album (though the seeds of "Born in the USA" are in this moment).

Black and white flashbacks, which, while conventional, are beautifully shot and acted, fill us in further on moments of Springsteen's difficult childhood. Matthew Pellicano Jr. is intense, like a little sculpture, as the solemn boy, and Stephen Graham is closed and forbidding as the mean, aggressive but needy father who, one day, picks up the kid in the big truck he's driving and takes him to see Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter with Mitchem and Winters.

All this is interesting, but it may take one a while to put it together. The real focus of the film though - and ,the real fun from the portrait-of-the-artist point of view - is seeing the technical details of Springsteen making his Nebraska album in that bungalow alone with a single assistant, Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser). He relies only on a new model small multitrack TASCAM 144 Portastudio cassette deck installed in his bedroom. Bent on probing and expressing his deepest feelings, he winds up up preferring that set of raw acoustic recordings to the studio version with his E Street Band and we see how hard he has to fight for that decision.

As Brother Bro says on The Oscar Expert's evaluation on their October 2026 Oscar predictions video (go to 30 mins.) this movie, while perhaps not as "well made" as A Complete Unknown in crafts and cinematography (and I'd add not as niftily flowing and dramatic in its scene-to-scene storytelling), avoids being the "nauseating music biopic" that goes from song to song to song delivering all the artist's hits, is "soul-searching" and is about "who is Bruce," and is about "let artists make art" and "not let them get bogged down by the world of commercial viability." This film is one of the better cinematic depictions, then, of an artist making art and fighting to maintain its integrity. (The Oscar Expert ranked it at #14 in their Oscar list.) As David Rooney says, "anyone eager for a detailed track-by-track study of the [Nebraska] album should turn to Warren Zanes’ book, which served as the basis for Cooper’s screenplay." In cinematic terms the relative elision was a wise choice.

You may have noticed I have not had anything to say about Odessa Young as Faye Romano, the interpolated single-mom waitress Bruce has an invented affair with, whom he meets outside the place where his career was launched, The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The toothy Australian actress is good, she has nice edge. But her character is a bit extraneous except to show how preoccupied and emotionally withdrawn Springsteen was in this period, and she has a powerful final speech. David Brody in his unsparing New Yorker review finds Bruce and Faye's one sex "establishing shot" embarrassingly perfunctory. But there's a sex sequence before that that's quite intense.

I've also not said anything about the depictions of depression (Brody calls them "refined and tamped-down"; yes, but they're there, intensely so when he gets to Los Angeles). Nor have I said anything about the music, because I've never been a Springsteen fan and I know nothing about it, stirring and anthemic though it is. This also is a big difference from the Dylan film; and even though I'm not an expert on Mahler, his Symphony No. 2 in C minor, "Resurrection" makes a glorious finale musical piece in Maestro. Deliver Me from Nowhere is a work in a lower key. But it has authentic feeling to it - the scenes between White and Strong as Bruce's longtime manager Jon Landa are affecting - and it's not a bad film.

Deliver Me from Nowhere, 119 mins., premiered at Telluride Aug. 29, 2025, showing also at NYFF Sept. 28 and also Lyon, BFI London, and São Paulo, and opened in theaters Oct. 24, 2025. Metacritic rating: 59%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.